Chapter Two Barb
Chapter Two
Barb
At the moment, I’m not too worried. She lives in Los Angeles, in the godforsaken dregs of Venice Beach, where Arnold Schwarzenegger once lifted weights and marijuana smoke thickens the air.
When I wake up at seven in New Jersey, it’s only four in LA, too early for her to call.
As the morning drags on, I tell myself she’ll phone on the way to the coffee shop where she writes each day.
She’s vague about what she’s working on—a screenplay, I assume, given her film degree from UCLA and proximity to Hollywood.
She tutors part time, but I worry about her financial stability.
Since she’s never asked me for a dime, I don’t press her about her employment.
Our relationship is still finding its footing.
Unwanted motherly inquiries could quickly set it off balance.
You have to trust her, my therapist Christine says, even when you know she’s wrong.
Let her make her own mistakes. I didn’t start seeing a therapist until I retired.
In retirement, I do all sorts of things I never thought I’d do, retiring being chief among them.
The other being a book club. My friend Linda was persistent.
When I was working sixty-hour weeks, it was easy to blow her off.
Since retiring, I’ve run out of excuses.
Linda, it turns out, is more relentless than the analysts at the investment firm where I worked for nearly half a century.
I love her for it, not just because book club has been all the things she promised—new friends, good books, better wine—but because today, on my birthday, it provides a distraction from worrying that my daughter won’t call.
My book club is taking me to lunch at noon.
The restaurant is a fifteen-minute drive from my home, so I leave at 11:50, which is 8:50 in Venice Beach.
This guarantees I’ll be a few minutes late.
There’s nothing more depressing than being the first to arrive for your own birthday lunch.
As I drive along Route 4, I think about the last time I saw my daughter, the only time since we reconciled.
It was three months ago, right after I was forced to retire.
A retirement on paper. The act itself was a firing, plain and simple.
Though I sound bitter, I’m not. I’m devastated.
I was devastated. My therapist encourages me to keep the past in the rearview.
It rushes up when I least expect it. That’s betrayal for you.
Romantic, professional, familial—you forget, then bam, it sidelines you with its impossible cruelty.
The silver lining about my forced retirement was that it gave me the courage to visit my daughter.
Ever since we’d been back in touch, I’d wanted to see her, but I was scared.
We had more experience fighting than getting along.
Any misstep could have reverted us to the days before we were sequestered in our homes, when her life was full and complete without me.
You’re still afraid of rejection, my therapist reminds me, something so obvious I wonder if she’s been listening to me at all.
Instead of telling my daughter that I wanted to visit her, I invented a conference and reserved a two-bedroom suite at Shutters, inviting her to spend a week in divine comfort with me.
If she’d researched it, she would have discovered no such event existed.
When she arrived at the hotel, she didn’t even ask how the conference was.
We went for walks along the beach and massages at the spa.
We had dinner anywhere she wanted and breakfast each morning on our waterfront balcony.
I asked few questions about her life, and she offered little beyond her preferences for restaurants each evening.
I didn’t mind. We were building a relationship.
That takes time. I was willing to be patient.
On the last night of the trip, she took me to an Italian restaurant off the Venice boardwalk that was surprisingly quiet and surprisingly good.
A date had taken her there. I didn’t ask anything about the date, whether he’d become a boyfriend, if she had a boyfriend at all.
Instead, I asked her what was good, then ordered exactly as she advised even though the tomato sauce gave me heartburn that kept me up for the entire red-eye home.
Big birthday coming up, she said when she hugged me goodbye. Any plans?
Want to go to Europe with me? I almost asked her. There was no rush. We have years ahead for new adventures together.
Probably just lunch with friends.
Remember to have fun, she advised.
I peer at the clock on my dashboard as I pull into the parking lot. 12:03. A little after 9:00 a.m. in Venice. Still no call.
Inside, my book club is waiting at a round table, menus folded, napkins in their laps. They clap. “There’s the birthday girl!”
I give each of the ladies a hug. Linda, Delia, Gloria, and Susanna. Normally I go by Barb. At book club, I’m Barbara. The five As. Linda teases that she wouldn’t have invited me if my name ended with a y or an e—or, god forbid, a consonant.
Other than our names and the fact that we’re all Jewish, we couldn’t be more different.
Linda is a retired reading specialist, Delia never worked, Gloria never married, and Susanna still runs a chain of local bakeries.
Delia is tall and lean, with dyed black hair and one too many facelifts.
The rest of us are in various stages of aging, Susanna being the only one who has fully embraced her gray hair and wrinkles, her pear shape.
During the pandemic, I stopped dyeing my hair, which is still mostly dark.
I’m just plump enough to keep the deep wrinkles at bay, though I get my sunspots removed religiously.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d gone under the knife, like Delia, hired a trainer when my midsection began to thicken, like Gloria, done chemical peels and Botox, like Linda, whether the male partners at the firm would have discarded me so swiftly.
When they offered me an exceedingly generous retirement package, I went to see a lawyer—a woman—who told me I could sue for ageism.
I couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing.
Although the book club ladies and I have little in common, we’re never short of conversation.
My birthday’s no exception. I nod along as Susanna and Linda swap stories of their grandchildren, as Delia laments the singledom of her three children, as Gloria jokes that all the men she dates are still children themselves.
I don’t realize I’m checking my phone until Linda asks, “Got a hot date later?”
I look at her, confused.
“You keep staring at your phone.”
It’s 12:47—9:47 in LA.
“I haven’t heard from Regina.” I put the phone in my purse, then place my purse under my chair. “It’s probably nothing.”
“She’ll call.” Linda squeezes my hand.
After I’ve eaten the last of my chocolate cake, the women shoo away my credit card.
This is part of our tradition, too, the song and dance of pretending that we don’t know the others will pay on our birthday.
Normally this kind of charade would annoy me, but it has the distinct giddiness of a first date.
I used to date a lot. Lately, it hasn’t held the same appeal.
Most eligible men my age are widowed, recently single.
Isaac and I divorced when Regina was thirteen.
I’ve been single so long, it’s hard to remember I was ever married.
While my life has had its fair share of grief, I’m not in that stage now and don’t want to usher someone I don’t know through their loss.
Outside, the afternoon is bright and sticky. I wave goodbye to my friends and thank them for the meal, saying I’ll see them at book club next week. It’s 2:08, after 11:00 in LA. Even if Regina was up all night, she’s awake now, caffeinated and cogent enough to call her mother on her birthday.
“She’ll call,” Linda assures me as she hugs me goodbye. We’ve been friends since her husband started at my firm. He’s seventy-four and still working. No one summoned him in to human resources to encourage him to embrace retirement in this stage of life and all the freedom that could come with it.
I first met Linda at our annual holiday party, when Regina was seven and Isaac and I were in the early stages of discord, before I started working longer hours and he started sleeping with Anna.
Anna. She could have been the sixth A in our book club, if she hadn’t shacked up with my husband.
I was less upset that he’d cheated than I was that it had been with my friend.
To be honest, I felt more grief over the loss of Anna than of Isaac.
Linda knows all about the divorce, the ways it affected Regina.
In my car, I run my hands along the steering wheel, trying to determine why Regina hasn’t called.
Doesn’t she know I’m waiting for her? My therapist would tell me that games don’t help relationships.
If I want to talk to my daughter, I should call her.
If I’m upset she forgot my birthday, I should say so.
I hold my phone and stare at Regina’s name. My heart races. This is silly. I’m being silly. It’s my daughter, not some date, some new friend. I hit Send before I lose my nerve.
The blood rushes to my ears, and I can hardly hear the ringing as I wait for her to pick up. This is foolish. Why did I call? I’m about to hang up without leaving a message when she answers.
“Hey, Mom,” she says. I hear her give someone her name after they ask for ID. Then her voice grows clearer on the line. “Listen, I can’t talk right now.”
“Where are you?”
She hesitates. “A meeting. I’ll call you later, all right?”
I stare at her name on my phone as it blinks the eleven seconds we spoke.
Clearly she’s forgotten my birthday, but she isn’t avoiding me.
She’s just busy. And she’s going to her meetings.
That’s good. That has to be her first priority.
Later, when she realizes the date, that she rushed me off the phone on my seventieth birthday, she’ll be apologetic.
I’ll get to tell her it’s no big deal. It won’t have to be a big deal because she will have remembered, if a bit late.
Once I’m home, I can’t fight a nap. I plug in my white noise machine, drape a silk mask over my eyes, and fall into a deep slumber. When I wake up, the sun is still high in the sky. It’s later than I expect, though: 5:32. 2:32 in LA. Her meeting must be over by now. Regina hasn’t called back.
For the rest of the evening, I play the tricks of young lovers.
I leave my phone at home when I go for a sunset stroll with my next-door neighbor.
I linger in the shower, knowing I won’t hear the phone if it rings.
It doesn’t ring when I’m in the shower. It doesn’t ring as I watch Jeopardy!
, when I cook dinner for one, when I decide to start in on our book club selection.
By the time the words on the page blur, the phone still hasn’t rung.
I call her again and get her voicemail. I start to text her instead.
Everything I write sounds hurt or resentful.
I’m both those things, but I don’t want her to know.
As I start my nighttime skin-care routine, I remind myself that Regina’s never been a good multitasker.
If her attention is elsewhere, it won’t return to me until she’s completed whatever is consuming her.
You have to accept people on their terms, my therapist tells me whenever Regina disappoints me.
These are her terms. While it may be my birthday, it’s her busy day.
I can be disappointed. Feeding that emotion, however, only hurts me.
“Let it go,” I say to my reflection, shiny with layers of cream. “Just let it go.”
As soon as my head hits the pillow, my mind starts spinning tales of what I might have done to make her mad at me.
My knees crack as I get out of bed and shuffle over to the dresser to check my phone—no message—then back to bed, chiding myself for getting so worked up.
Finally, I pop an Ambien, because despite being so tired I feel it in the bones of my feet, I will never fall asleep, not when I’m waiting for the phone to ring.
It’s 12:32 a.m. in New Jersey. 9:32 p.m. in LA.
I try her one last time. That familiar message picks up.
The pill starts to set in, leaving my eyelids heavy, my brain quiet.
The last thought I piece together is an assurance that I will have a remorseful message in the morning.
At 5:45, I startle awake, gasping for breath.
The Ambien should have kept me asleep for another hour, but the pain is overwhelming.
It isn’t the aches of old age. No, this pressure is panic.
I’m not an anxious person. Through my divorce, the estrangement, the forced retirement, I never had anxiety.
That’s why I know to trust the worry my body senses now.
I check my phone. No calls. No text messages.
I lean against the dresser, barely able to stand.
Call it instinct, intuition, survival skills.
I feel it everywhere. My daughter isn’t busy.
She hasn’t lost track of time. Something terrible has happened to her.